Daily Archives: February 12, 2017

The Spider-Verse is ever evolving. Old players come back. Sometimes for the better. Venom was a pretty old character. They did whatever they could to keep him relevant. But a homicidal symbiote alien can only do so much. He can take over good guys, bad guys, make alien children who are worse than he is. What do you do when all of that is done? You make him a good guy. Agent Venom is his name, and the suit is worn by none other than Flash Thompson. Wait what? Flash Thompson, the jerk that picked on poor teenager Peter Parker is now a good guy? He cleaned up his ways, went off to the military and became a good soldier before losing his legs.

Superhero landing!

Thompson and the Venom symbiote found their way into space, and a bit of adventures, with Venom being taken over with mind control. Finding their way to Venom’s home planet of Klyntar, the other Klyntar helped cure Venom of the craziness, allowing Thompson to tap into the full potential of Venom, creating quite a fine space faring knight, and an intergalactic ambassador of Earth. Can’t say I ever saw that coming from way back in the day when I first read the original comics of Spider-Man and Venom’s run-ins.

The figure is exactly what we want with a Build-a-Figure. He is a big boy. Strong and muscular. He as fairly good articulation. Most of the super-muscular guys tend to lose some of the articulation that the slight figures have.

He is mostly black, to no one’s surprise. He has his white trademark spider on his chest. Changing a bit from the original design of Venom, this version has some extra white detailing around the shoulders, and white on the insides of the hands. He still retains the white on the back of the hands. He even has white running up the back of his calves. Hasbro really did to a nice job with the paint this time around.

For his head and neck, it looks more like armor plating rather than organics. His head looks like a helmet with a strong brow and an equally strong jaw. I was surprised by how pointy the chin is. The ultra creepy eyes of the past are gone and what remains are white outlines similar to Agent Venom, with lines that bleed down his jaw.

This is a great finish to this wave. We have had quite a few BAFs from the Spider-Verse. Rhino was the biggest. Finally there is someone who can take him on face to face. Let the battle begin!

Here we go again… another Hobgoblin and another Electro. Well, for Hobgoblin, we had to build the figure, and he was a strange version. It is nice to get the standard version. And as for Electro, we only got the movie version, so it is good to get our hands on the crazy masked version.

Hobgoblin was created in 1983, when the write was under pressure to bring the Green Goblin back yet again to battle Spider-Man. Well, when you don’t want to keep bringing guys back from the dead, you create a new villain. This was not just the Green Goblin in a new costume, though it was pretty much the Green Goblin in a new costume. Fly around on a goblin glider and thrown flaming pumpkin bombs at people. Yup, pretty much the same.

With the Build a Figure, I was not terribly impressed. The body was less detailed than I expected. This time around, it is all different. The costume is great, with good details, like the mesh on the arms. The cloak is torn and the folds in the leather gauntlets and boots is well done.

Hobgoblin comes with a man-purse, a bomb, glider, and alternate super creepy head. I was not surprised to see that we are getting a Green Goblin in the upcoming Sandman Wave. Hasbro loves to introduce something like the glider, and then get their money’s worth out of the design. And we haven’t gotten a proper Green Goblin since 2006. That is still during the days of ToyBiz for those who are keeping track.

Electro is a great bad guy for Spider-Man. Even Sony thought so and created a terrible version for their movie. Alas, the toy was not great either. Blue sparkly head with electric hands. Guess what? The head is better this time, but we still only get the electric hands! What gives?!? You pack in 3 sets of hand for Spider-Man, but cannot give Electro a second set of hands with out electricity? That is total garbage.

We do get a couple of nice heads for Sparky here. He comes with the tattooed head with a pot leaf on his face, or is that electricity? Oh, I see. It is supposed to be a tattooed version of his fantastic mask. 😉

Well the good news is that we also get the awesome electric mask. That may be one of the best accessories packed in yet. It looks right, and like any good Spider-Man villain, it is larger than life.

Well, there you have it. Only two bad guys in this wave. Even Venom is a good guy now. Fear not, we have 4 new bad guys in the upcoming Sandman Wave. Of course it is going to include 3 new Spider-Men, so the Spider-Verse will be growing too. Bad guys are not going to have a lot of hope with this many spiders running around.